MIKHAIL BULGAKOV: THE WHITE GUARD

'I've come from the Red Tavern district. Can I spend the night here, please, Lena? I'll never make it home tonight.'

'My God, of course you can.'

Suddenly Myshlaevsky groaned, tried to blow on his fingers, but his lips would not obey him. His face grew moist as the frost on his eyebrows and smooth, clipped moustache began to melt. The elder Turbin unbuttoned Myshlaevsky's service tunic, pulled out his dirty shirt and ran his finger down the seam.

'Well, of course . . . Thought so. You're crawling with lice.'

'Then you must have a bath.' Frightened, Elena had momentarily forgotten about Talberg. 'Nikolka, there's some firewood in the kitchen. Go and light the boiler. Oh, why did I have to give Anyuta the evening off? Alexei, take his tunic off, quickly.'

By the tiled stove in the dining-room Myshlaevsky let out a groan and collapsed into achair. Elena bustled around, keys clinking. Kneeling down, Alexei and Nikolka pulled off Myshlaevsky's smart, narrow boots strapped around the calf.

'Easy now . . . oh, take it easy . . .'

They unwound his dirty, stained puttees. Under them was a pair of mauve silk socks. Nikolka at once put the tunic out on to the cold verandah, where the temperature would kill the lice. In his filthy cotton shirt, criss-crossed by a pair of black suspenders and blue breeches strapped under his instep Myshlaevsky now looked thin, dark, sick and miserable. He slapped his frozen palms together and rubbed them against the side of the stove.

'News . . . rumors . . . People . . . Reds . . .'

'. . . May . . . fell in love . . .'

'What bastards they are!' shouted Alexei Turbin. 'Couldn't they at least have given you some felt boots and a sheepskin jerkin?'

'Felt boo-oots', Myshlaevsky mimicked him, weeping. 'Felt boo . . .'

Unbearable pain gripped his hands and feet in the warmth. Hearing Elena's footsteps go into the kitchen, Myshlaevsky screamed, in tears, screamed furiously:

'It was a shambles!'

Croaking and writhing in pain he collapsed and pointing at his socks, groaned:

'Take them off, take them off . . .'

There was a sickening smell of methylated spirits as frozen extremities thawed out; from a single small wineglass of vodka Lieutenant Myshlaevsky became intoxicated in a moment, his eyes clouding.

'Oh Lord, don't say they'll have to be amputated . . .'he said bitterly, rocking back and forth in his chair.

'Nonsense, of course not. You'll be all right . . . Yes. The big toe's frostbitten. There . . . The pain will go.'

Nikolka squatted down and began to pull on some clean black socks while Myshlaevsky's stiff, wooden hands inched into the sleeves of a towelling bathrobe. Crimson patches began to appear on his cheeks and Lieutenant Myshlaevsky, grimacing in clean underwear and bathrobe, loosened up and came back to life. A stream of foul abuse rattled around the room like hail on a window-sill. Squinting with rage, he poured a stream of obscenities on the headquarters staff in their first-class railroad cars, on a certain Colonel Shchetkin, the cold, Petlyura, the Germans and the snowstorm and ended by heaping the most vulgar abuse on the Hetman of All the Ukraine himself.

Alexei and Nikolka watched the lieutenant's teeth chatter as he thawed out, making occasional sympathetic noises.

'The Hetman? Mother-fucker!' Myshlaevsky snarled. 'Where were the Horse Guards, eh? Back in the palace! And we were sent out in what we stood up in . . . Days on end in the snow and frost . . . Christ! I thought we were all done for . . . Nothing but a row of officers strung out at intervals of two hundred yards - is that what you call a defensive line? It was only by the grace of God that we weren't slaughtered like chickens!'

'Just a minute', Turbin interrupted, his head reeling under the flow of abuse. 'Who was with you at the Tavern?'

'Huh!' Myshlaevsky gestured angrily. 'You've no idea what it was like! How many of us d'you think there were at the Tavern? For-ty men. Then that scoundrel Colonel Shchetkin drove up and said (here Myshlaevsky twisted his expression in an attempt to imitate the features of the detested Colonel Shchetkin and he began talking in a thin, grating lisp): "Gentlemen, you are the City's last hope. It is your duty to live up to the trust placed in you by the Mother of Russian Cities and if the enemy appears - attack, God is with us! I shall send a detachment to relieve you after six hours. But I beg you to conserve your ammunition . . ." (Myshlaevsky spoke in his ordinary voice again) - and then he and his aide vanished in their car. Dark - it was like being up the devil's arsehole! And the frost - needles all over your face.'

'But why were you there, for God's sake? Surely Petlyura can't be at Red Tavern?'

'Christ knows. By morning we were nearly out of our minds. By midnight we were still there, waiting for the relief. Not a sign of them. No relief. For obvious reasons we couldn't light fires, the nearest village was a mile and a half away, the Tavern half a mile. At night you start seeing things-the fields seem to be moving. You think it's the enemy crawling up on you . . . Well, I thought, what shall we do if they really do come? Would I throw down my rifle, I wondered - would I shoot or not? It was a temptation. We stood there, howling like wolves. When you shouted someone along the line would answer. Finally I burrowed in the snow with my rifle-butt and dug myself a hole, sat down and tried not to fall asleep: once you fall asleep in that temperature you're done for. Towards morning I couldn't hold out any longer - I was beginning to doze off. D'you know what saved me? Machine-gun fire. I heard it start up at dawn, about a mile or two away. And, believe it or not, I found I just didn't want to stand up. Then a field-gun started booming away. I got up, feeling as if each leg weighed a ton and I thought: "This is it, Petlyura's turned up." We closed in and shortened the line so that we were near enough to shout to each other, and we decided that if anything happened we would form up into a tight group, shoot our way out and withdraw back into town. If they overran us - too bad, they overran us. At least we'd be together. Then, imagine - the firing stopped. Later in the morning we took it in turns to go to the Tavern three at a time to warm up. When d'you think the relief finally turned up? At two o'clock this afternoon. Two hundred officer cadets from the ist Detachment. And believe it or not they were all properly dressed in fur hats and felt boots and they had a machine-gun squad. Colonel Nai-Turs was in command of them.'

'Ah! He's one of ours!' cried Nikolka.

'Wait a minute, isn't he in the Belgrade Hussars?' asked Alexei.

'Yes, that's right, he's a hussar . . . well, you can imagine, they were appalled when they saw us: "We thought you were at least two companies with a machine-gun - how the hell did you stand it?" Apparently that machine-gun fire at dawn was an attack on Serebryanka by a horde of about a thousand men. It was lucky they didn't know that our sector was defended by that thin line, otherwise that mob might have broken into the City. It was lucky, too that our people at Serebryanka had a telephone line to Post-Volynsk. They signalled that they were under attack, so some battery was able to give the enemy a dose of shrapnel. Well, you can imagine that soon cooled their enthusiasm, they broke off the attack and vanished into thin air.'

'But who were they? Surely they weren't Petlyura's men? It's impossible.'

'God knows who they were. I think they were some local peasants - Dostoyevsky's "holy Russia" in revolt. Ugh - motherfuckers . . .'

'God almighty!'

'Well,' Myshlaevsky croaked, sucking at a cigarette, 'thank God we were relieved in the end. We counted up and there were thirty-eight of us left. We were lucky - only two of us had died of frostbite. Done for. And two more were carried away. They'll have to have their legs amputated . . .'